The Restricted Section
by Thunder Stag
Summary: Anybody can check out the first seven books. But we've all wondered - what's in the restricted section?
1. The Value of a Laugh

**Greetings, all, from Thunder Stag! This is (hopefully) going to be a series of one-shots from Harry Potter, some cracky and some not. I'm not sticking to any specific characters or times, although I will mostly be doing Golden Trio stuff. Leave a comment if you want to tell me something! I don't own Harry Potter. He is JK Rowling's and JK Rowling's alone.**

Harry bent over the table, a bead of sweat running down his forehead. It was all up to him. He, Harry Potter, the Chosen One, the Boy who Lived, was the only person left who could act in enough time to save not only himself, but the others surrounding him. He carefully twitched his wand, moving the next stone over barely a millimeter. When nothing happened, he leaned back in his chair, sighing in relief. Unfortunately, his sudden slump was enough to shake the table and jiggle the stone.

Without warning, the entire table's worth of Gobstones practically exploded, spraying greenish slime over Harry, and with him, Ron and Hermione. Harry stayed where he was, trying to get his heart rate back under control, while Ron roared with laughter. Hermione wasn't far behind.

"The - the look on your _face_, mate!" Ron managed to gasp between bouts of laughter. Hermione wasn't any better.

"And his glasses! You look like a mad scientist!" Hermione cried. Harry managed to move at last, and hastily scrubbed off his glasses on his robes.

"Well, what if I _am_ a mad scientist?" Harry challenged.  
Before Ron could ask, Hermione told him, "like a muggle Snape." Ron went back to laughing.

"Maybe that wasn't Gobstone juice!" Harry said, waving his arms around. "Maybe it was poison only I'm immune to!"

Ron managed to stop laughing. "Mate, I'd only start being worried if you were actually good at potions." Hermione stifled a snort.

"You're one to talk," Harry pointed out. Ron snorted.

"Yeah, but I'm not trying to kill my best mate," he pointed out. Sudden inspiration dawned on his face. "Or _am_ I?" He added, and a badly attempt at a fiendish grin spread on his face. This time, Hermione didn't even try to stifle a snort.

"Both of you are ridiculous," She told them. She waved her wand, and the slime disappeared from her hair and clothes. Then she took the picked up her bag and started to walk towards the stairs to the girl's dorm.

Harry and Ron began trying to remove the goo as well. Harry tried to get some of the stuff out of Ron's hair only to have it turn periwinkle. Ron reciprocated by poking Harry on the nose with his wand and somehow managing to make said appendage turn into a surprisingly accurate copy of Dumbledore's long, crooked one.

"By the way," Hermione called from the door of the girl's dorm. "I'd watch what the two of you drink for the next few days." With that, she turned and went up to bed. Harry and Ron stared at each other for a moment, and then broke down into brand-new laughter.


	2. Advice

**I don't own Harry Potter. Author's note at bottom.**

There had been seven Weasleys at Hogwarts in the most recent generation, and not one of them had had the same first day. Bill had been the Weasley to have a normal experience — he was sorted into Gryffindor without a moment's hesitation, and made friends there right away. Charlie had done the same, but ended up getting lost on the way up to the Gryffindor common room, and ended up befriending a purple-haired girl named Tonks, who was just as lost. A prefect found them the next morning, sound asleep and Tonk's hair as flaming Weasley red as Charlie's.

Percy's first day was chaotic. Though Mr. Weasley had been able to stay home with Ron and little Ginny, nobody realized that the twins had snuck along in the trunk of the Ford Angelina until they were actually at the station, and even then they almost managed to make it onto the Hogwarts Express before their mother caught them. With the stigma of his two brothers, both whooping loudly with delight as they were chased across the station by an irate Mrs. Weasley, Percy ended up in a compartment by himself and spent the whole way to Hogwarts alone. Even at Hogwarts, he didn't have many friends until the next year, when the story had lost some of its attraction.

Fred and George, of course, had caused trouble the moment they got on the train and away from their mother's prying eyes — they openly mocked a pair of Slytherin prefects and only just managed to find refuge in a compartment where a lonely fellow first year — Lee Jordan, as it turned out — met and hid them under the seats. That wasn't the end of it, either; Once at Hogwarts, they nearly succeeded in starting a food fight during the welcome feast, and _did_ manage to get separated and lost on the way to Gryffindor tower. Neither had a boring night.

While Fred was led on a merry chase by Peeves (they respected and distrusted the poltergeist in equal measure after that occasion, and managed to earn his respect in turn over their Hogwarts career), George got turned around and found himself in a tunnel behind a mirror on the ground floor, where Fred found him an hour later and Charlie, who was head boy by then, a few minutes after that. They went on to find immense popularity and infamy as they pranked the school without mercy.

Ron's big adventure, of course, was that he met and befriended Harry Potter (and wasn't Ginny absolutely ecstatic when she found out about it), and managed to make an enemy of Draco Malfoy before he even got to Hogwarts. In later years, when they met at the Hogwarts Class of 1997/1998 reunion, they stumbled onto their continuing argument over the value of blood and found that despite not actively attacking each other most of the time they still distinctly disliked each other (though later, when both had spiked the drink of the other with fairly spectacular amounts of alcohol, they did come to blows).

Ginny had had, at least for a Weasley, a pretty tame entrance. She was exhausted when they got there (later realizing that she felt fine before she remembered her diary), and despite having had a kind of conversation with a young blonde girl in her year whose name she didn't get until later, it was mostly Ginny being confused and the other girl being confusing. Even when she asked Tom afterwards, he was equally confused by the girl's bizarre logic. He told her not to hang around the girl anymore.

But now, Ginny was miserable. The Slytherins, especially one girl in her year named Chastity Fumier-Cheveux, were _awful_. They insulted her robes (second hand, but clean, and at least they weren't falling apart!), her father (Ginny _liked_ the mad junk in his shed, even if her mother was suspicious of most of it), and told her that she wasn't any better than a blood traitor. That was when she ran away. She found herself on the Hogwarts grounds, probably closer to the Forbidden forest than was strictly safe.

"'Ello, there!" boomed a loud, frightening voice. Ginny jumped up and whirled around, but went too fast and fell. "Woah, now, don' ge' all jumpy, now," said the owner of the voice. Ginny recognized him immediately — this was Hagrid, the Gamekeeper. Ron was friends with him.

"I — I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be by the forest, but I —" she stuttered, but Hagrid just chuckled and waved her apology aside.

"Ah, 's not a bother." He said in his booming voice. "I've spen' half my life chasin' yer brothers away from tha' there forest. Mind you, 's nice havin' one who isn' tryin' to ge' in."

"I — um — thank you, Mr. Hagrid, sir," she managed. The gamekeeper grinned at her, the first genuinely kind smile she had seen at Hogwarts so far.

"Yer brother Ron tol' me all 'bout you, lass," he told her. "Come on, now, would ye fancy a cuppa?"

Ginny nodded furiously, and hurried after the giant as he strode away. His legs were so long she had to jog to keep up. "Um, Mr. Hagrid? How did you know Ron is my brother?" She asked. The kind smile grew wider.

"Didn't have to, did I? Anybody who knows yer family like I do can spot a Weasley a mile off. 'Course, fer a few like that coward Malfoy, tha's no' a good thing." His voice had gotten a little tight when he mentioned Malfoy, but Ginny hardly noticed. She remained silent until they reached Hagrid's hut, but when the kettle had been hung over the fire, she spoke again.

"Mr. Hagrid?"

He glanced over from where he was (for some reason) pulling rocks out of the pantry. "Jus' Hagrid, lass. Tha's what ever'body calls me."

Ginny almost managed to smile for real now. "Do you know why the Slytherin girls hate me so much? Every time I see them, they just tell my my robes are ugly, or my dad is stupid, or my whole family is stupid." She didn't know why she was asking Hagrid. He was so friendly — not like Tom, this was different — but should she trust him? Was that really wise? His next words answered her.

"I dunno why fer sure, lass." Hagrid said. The teapot was whistling, and he started to pour. "Bu' whenever a Slytherin and a Gryffindor meet, sparks fly. They jus' don' know when to stop — but mind you, a lo' of Gryffindors don', either. If I were you, lass, I'd ignore 'em an' get on with my life." He took a long drink of his still-hot tea, which didn't seem to bother him. His kind eyes sparked at her.

"But you're not me, Hagrid!" Ginny exclaimed. She felt uncharacteristically angry. "How would you know? You can 't know!"

Hagrid's eyes didn't stop sparkling, but they did change. The look there told her to stop speaking, right there. "No, I'm no' you, lass. But do ye think I got this big after school? Kids are some o' the meanest beasts yer likely to meet anywhere, when they've got somethin' to mock. Jus' hold up yer chin an' remember — they're no' right."

He let her think on that for a moment, and when she looked up, he was handing her a plate of rocks. No, wait — these were little cakes. How bad could they be?

She made the mistake of trying one, but gave it up as a bad job when her teeth barely dented it.

After that, they spent a relatively pleasant while just talking, and then Ginny went back to the castle. Nobody was going to boss Ginny Molly Weasley around anymore — and heaven help anyone who tried.

** I am **_**really**_** sorry this took so long to get out. I wanted this to be a weekly thing, something to post every Thursday, but my Beta was too busy to get back to me about the story, so it ended up being another week before it was even ready for print. And I had a thing on Thursday, and my weekend was busy, and it all kind of snowballed. So here you go, well over a week late!**

**Like it? Hate it? Tell me how you feel, and maybe give me suggestions for what to do next, because I could **_**not**_** think of what to write for this one. Thanks!**

** -Thunder Stag**


	3. The Map, Pt One

**Hey, all. Thunder Stag here.**

**Sorry for leaving this fic unattended for so long. I had a play, and work, and plain old laziness, and, well, basically real life interfered. So I'm sorry for that.**

**But, in return for the patience you've shown, I'm posting what is, at the moment, the longest thing I've ever submitted to Fanfiction. I hope you enjoy; if you do, leave a comment telling me why. If you don't, see my previous sentence. Enjoy!**

Fred and George Weasley were covered head to foot in Muggle shaving cream. They stood in Argus Filch's office, a strange combination of terrified and elated with their most recent adventure. Nobody could prove it was them, of course — the twins had barely been at Hogwarts for a fortnight, and even at home they had never before pulled something as bold as this.

It all started with the two of them looking to get revenge on a Slytherin who had, in typical snake-like behavior, rather back-handedly insulted their family. They weren't entirely sure what he had even said, to be honest — but his smug look and the jeers of the other Slytherins was enough for them. They didn't waste a lot of time with the plan: the next person to leave the dungeons by the main exit would be doused in shaving cream and sparkles. It never occurred to them that their enemy _might_ not be the next person to go upstairs. It was their rotten luck that the one who _did_ in fact leave next was none other than Severus Snape.

Now, Fred and George were wholly inexperienced in the art of pranking, at least against someone they weren't related to. They made several key mistakes: first, of course, that their target would not be the one they hit. Second, that they should be somewhere else, doing something else, in the presence of people who could back up their story should it become necessary when the prank happened. And thirdly, that they should avoid being in the blast range of the shaving cream and sparkles when they erupted.

So it was fairly obvious that they were the culprits behind Snape's newly pleasant smell and sparkly hair. He had taken them without delay and hardly a word to his office, where he used sticking charms to anchor them to the floor by the bottoms of their shoes and called Filch through the Floo. They did try to take off their shoes to get out, but the spell apparently prevented that, too. Or Snape had a spell on his office that prevented people from removing shoes.

The caretaker was only too happy to grab them both by the arm — his grip was painfully tight and cold even through their robes — and drag them to his office, where he locked the door and (from the sound of it) ran off, cackling gleefully. He was probably going to go find his thumb screws and hot irons. Unfortunately, he had underestimated the capacity of the Weasley twins for getting into trouble, which they immediately did. Filch hadn't stuck them to the floor after all; the only thing he had done was to set his weird cat to watching them.

So Fred began their assault on Filch's office by opening the drawers in his desk. Random crap he had taken from kids over the year, a comb, two sandwiches (one looked to be some kind of experiment, as there was some pretty nasty mold growing on it) and a pamphlet for some kind of mail order magic class. Boring.

So they began to go through the office's file cabinets. Their mother would not have approved: two walls were covered in cabinets, and most of the drawers were unlabeled except for the occasional year. Only one was really interesting, actually - a drawer labeled simply 'Marauders'.

It was absolutely overflowing with reports, files labeled with names (mostly S.B. and J.P., but a fair number with R.L. and P.P.) and old prank items both muggle and magical that looked to be at least a decade old. There was a little paper canister with a string, which (when George pulled on it, as any eleven year old would) exploded with a bang and showered them with confetti. Sadly, there were no others of that kind in the cabinet.

Naturally, the twins raided the drawer. Old files they thought might be interesting, trinkets that might still work (and some that certainly wouldn't but looked cool), a few pieces of unidentifiable parchment. There was an old hat that might have once belonged to Sprout, so covered it was by patches and tears, and a bag of what looked like pineapple, hardened and covered in sugar.

And just as naturally as their decision to 'liberate' the items, Filch re-entered the room right then and flipped out, grabbing them by the arms and taking back his precious loot. By the time he was done, all that was left were a few pieces of parchment Fred had managed to sneak into an inside pocket of his robes. Filch told them to return that evening for detention, and sent them back to their classes.

It wasn't until almost midnight when they got back to the common room. A few upperclassmen, deeply engrossed in their studies, briefly looked up and proceeded to ignore the red-headed first years. The two of them, finally alone, pulled out what loot they had managed to keep from Filch's office. All in all, it consisted of two pages of a case report for someone referred to only as SB, a rubber ball that changed colors every time it hit the ground, and an old, blank piece of parchment. Of course, neither Fred nor George thought that it was just that. They had found a _blank piece of parchment_ in Argus Filch's filing system. The parchment was at least a few years old, and young though the twins were, neither thought that a man as obsessed with cleanliness as Filch would leave a spare piece of parchment lying around.

So they set to work. Fred tried a lumos spell first — the twins had had a kind of ink that only showed up under the light of a lumos when they were younger, until it got lost in the jungle that was their room — but it didn't reveal anything. They tried holding a flame to the parchment, just close enough to make the Muggle invisible ink stuff their father had showed them once in his workshop show up, but it just burned the corner a little. None of their other attempts were any more fruitful.

A few days later, both of them were pretty much out of ideas. The parchment was stubbornly refusing to reveal what it hid, from secret messages to embarrassing photos, and George was sullenly tapping it with his wand. Fred, who was trying to master the _Wingardium Leviosa_ spell Flitwick was having them practice for homework, missed his feather and hit a bottle of ink. To his surprise, it lifted up about six inches — just enough that when he dropped it, startled, a drop spilled. The drop landed on the paper.

And the paper came to life.


	4. The Map, Part Two

**Okay, folks, I am back. I'm sorry it's been so long; one of my personal goals as a writer on this site was always to not be 'that guy', the one who only updated once a month or once every two months. Unfortunately, finals and Christmas, not to mention my job, got in the way, but I present to you a late Christmas gift: The Map, Part Two!**

Contrary to popular belief, the Marauders weren't formed in an instant. They didn't meet up trying to do the same outrageous prank on McGonagall (or separate ones, for that matter). In fact, they didn't all meet each other at the same time. Peter and Remus were friends with each other before they were friends with James or Sirius, and those two were the only ones who ended up best of friends at first sight.

But friends they were, and friends they remained for the rest of their school years and beyond. Their friendship yielded a number of things: they figured out Moony's 'furry little problem,' for one. The complicated art of animagus transformations was another. Untold pranks and countless raids on the Kitchen were a few more, but perhaps the most clever thing they ever did was to create the Marauder's map. It was an innocent idea, at first, at least for the Marauders...

"Ow! James, get off my foot! This is hard!"

The angry whisper was heard where it shouldn't have been, and at a time it definitely should not have been heard at: the Great Hall of Hogwarts, specifically over by the Slytherin tables. To an observer, it would have been empty air talking, which was less unlikely at Hogwarts than at the average Muggle school but — if you knew where to look and when to do so — you might have also seen an occasional flutter in the air, and the slightest hint of a sneaker, size six, peeking out from what appeared to be nothing. Only a select few could know that they were observing an Invisibility Cloak in effect.

Under the cloak, where James Potter and Remus Lupin were huddling, the messy-haired James took a sheepish half-step back, removing his foot from Remus'. There wasn't room for much more; Remus had grown over the summer between first and second years, and although James hadn't, there wasn't quite enough room underneath the cloak for two boys anymore. Remus was on prank duty tonight, which meant that he was in charge of casting the spells for the prank they were pulling: a thin film on the tables at specific spots, which would swap the flavors of the foods that rose onto them from the kitchens below. The Marauders were well acquainted with the ways of the kitchens, as a good third of their nighttime prowls led them in that direction.

Outside the Great Hall, the two other members of the Marauders were on guard duty. In this case, with Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew being the guards, little guarding was being done. Sirius was on the ground a few feet away from the door to the Great Hall, flat on his belly. It was actually not an uncommon position for Sirius — he and the other Marauders tended to get into fights for any number of reasons, and they usually found their way to the ground at some point. In this case, however, Sirius was trying to solve a mystery that was stubbornly staying unsolved: was there anything behind the bits of wall that often pretended to be doors and often tricked the unwary into pulling uselessly at the wall? Sirius thought that the best way to find out was to try to see underneath.

"I think I see something!" Sirius whispered excitedly. He beckoned Peter to join him on the floor, but the pudgy boy didn't move. "C'mon, Pete! There's something on the other side of this door!"

"We're supposed to be keeping watch!" Peter hissed back, and he looked down the hall, worried. He bent down to look under the door. "Isn't that just the wall?" He asked.

Sirius groaned and jumped to his feet, looking intently down the corridor for a moment, trying to be vigilant. Then he let out a great sigh. "This is really, really boring."

"We could play 'I spy'! Peter suggested. "I spy, with my little eye, something black!"

"No," Sirius replied.

"I spy something blue!"

"No."

"Something grey?"

"No, Pete! Ugh, this is boring, too. What's taking those two so long?"

"Maybe they found a new secret passage!" Peter replied. He was trying, and Sirius appreciated it on some level, but a bored Sirius Black was most typically a troublesome Sirius Black. It was a mark of the strength of the Marauder's friendship that he turned towards the doors of the Great Hall.

"Might as well check," Sirius replied, and towards the enormous doors.

It was lucky he and Peter had been whispering, or Filch (stumping around the corner that the Marauders would later learn led to the Slytherin dormitories) would have noticed them. As it was, Peter saw him coming (the small boy had surprisingly sharp eyes, at least when he was scared), and he was able to tackle Sirius and drag him behind a suit of armor before the caretaker saw them.

When he was gone, Peter and Sirius let out the breath they had been holding and stepped out from behind the suit. "We need some way to see someone coming," Peter whispered. Sirius nodded.

"We could get a bell that rings whenever somebody gets close," he said. "No, that would be dumb, they'd hear it. Maybe something only we could hear? But then it would go off whenever one of us got close..."

"We need a map!" said Peter.

Sirius snorted. "Don't be ridiculous."

James, as it turned out, agreed with Sirius. "How would we even make a map like that, Peter? He asked. "I bet even Dumbledore couldn't do it."

Peter slumped over a little. He had thought the idea was a good one, but if James said no, it was no.

At least, until Remus spoke up. "I don't know. I kind of like it."

Peter perked up. If Remus liked it, James and Sirius had to at least consider it, right?

"But how would we hide it?" James said after a long pause. "I mean, we could see if someone was coming, but we can't be looking at it all the time, and if one of the professors finds a map in our pockets, they'll take it away."

"What if only we could see it?" Peter suggested, taking Sirius' bell idea from earlier and modifying it. Sirius made a face.

"Yeah, but when I have my thirty children, I'll need to give it to my favorite one s he can keep up the Marauder tradition. If he can't see it, he'll just be like 'Dad, what's this invisible piece of paper for? And he won't be able to use it."

Remus snorted. It had been a running joke for a while now that Sirius wanted a small army of children, probably with which to take over the world, but he and the others agreed that if anyone was likely to have kids, it was Sirius. "What if we had a way to make the lines on the map invisible, but not the paper? And we could have a spell we cast on it to make the lines appear."

James and Sirius agreed to that idea, and Peter was pretty satisfied that someone had agreed with one of his ideas, which were usually either too absurd to pull off or required too much cheese to be feasible. This one, however, was on its way to being successful.

The map idea would stick, along with dozens of others over the years, but the map was perhaps the one that took longest. It was unbelievably complicated; Peter's initial idea had been for something like a Muggle radar, which would show a dot whenever somebody approached a set area, but the others convinced him to aim higher: a comprehensive map of the entire school, including every secret passage and carefully hidden nook. Then Remus took the idea still further — the map would be able to label every person in the school, so they could tell when it was safe to go somewhere and which teachers they could risk sneaking past. Sirius made another suggestion, which was along the lines of making it able to tell which spells people were casting when they cast them, but that kind of detection was something out of a Muggle science fiction film — which may have been where Sirius got the idea, as he set out to tick off his parents by visiting a theatre in Muggle London and came back two days later with a plastic lightsaber and false pointed ears.

Either way, the idea consumed them. They worked on it often, using just about every kind of detection spell they could think of. As it happened, there was no handy spell capable of telling you where every person in a building was, which was, perhaps, a bit obvious. Such a spell, had it already existed, would not have been available to four young students. There were a few spells used for quick and momentary detection, such as 'homenum revelio', which could tell you if there were people there, but it couldn't say who they were. Sirius had the inspired idea of trying to plant surveillance spells all around the castle, but it didn't work: the spells had been invented a very long time ago, and after a bit of testing, were too easy to fool if you had any idea they were there, which could be revealed by yet another spell. And they didn't last long enough to work, anyway. Finally, James had the winning idea: They would have to tap into the castle itself, into its magic and the magic of its inhabitants, to use the map correctly. This was less of a problem than one might think: For all the stories of the greatest wizards of all time 'connecting with the castle and gaining her favor' it really wasn't the active, living being most assumed. It had a consciousness, of course; most buildings with more than a few magic users did. The Ministry building in London had something similar to a consciousness, although it was younger than Hogwarts'. Really the only person who could say how aware Hogwarts was was Dumbledore himself, and he wasn't talking.

All the same, tapping into the magic of the castle was remarkably similar to sticking a plug into the wall of a non-magical building. It didn't power the map, of course (the map used the magic around it to power itself, which was a fairly common tactic). The magic tap was used to detect who was where, using the senses of the castle. It was not as easy as it sounded, of course; it required a massive bolt of power most easily found in a lightning bolt, and the adventure in which they acquired the power necessary put James and Peter in the Hospital Wing for a month while they regrew the bones that had been broken in the explosion. Finally, Remus (the most precise with his spells out of the four of them) was put to the task of drawing the map and laying most of the enchantments into it while James, Sirius and Peter perfected their animagus forms. They laid the final spells together, and then they were invincible.

It didn't last long, of course. Oh, the map would last about as long as the parchment held out, but with the Marauders getting bolder by the moment it was only a matter of time before they made a mistake; when they did, Argus Filch was there to tell them to turn out their pockets. Among assorted junk and gag items, he found something that wasn't obviously bad. He didn't know what an old bit of parchment was for, exactly, but it had come from the Marauders, and they had looked fairly crestfallen when he took it, so it was a fair bet that it was dangerous. He tucked it away in a filing cabinet and forgot about it. It wouldn't see the light of day in years, but when it did...well, the legacy of the Marauders went on.

**And there you have it, folks! The Map, Part Two, is the longest thing I have thus far posted on this site, and will hopefully not remain that way for too long.**

**In other news, I am planning (not with any degree of confidence, but planning all the same) to hopefully post the first chapter of a new fanfiction in the next few weeks. Keep your eye out for whatever I end up naming it, and whatever I post next, I will state what my posting schedule is to be for the foreseeable future. Thanks, leave a review, and have a happy 2015!**


	5. The Cards We're Dealt

Her arguments are many and varied – well thought out, in fact, and arrayed with the Transfiguration Professor's usual precision and logic. The muggles here _are_ horrible – in fact, they would, in any other circumstances Albus can imagine, be well out of the question. He would much rather leave them alone and unmolested than he would subject anyone, muggle or magical, to the not-remotely-tender mercies of Vernon and Petunia Dursley.

But the situation has forced his hand. Voldemort is dead, or as close as one so utterly steeped in the darkest of arts can be; the world is celebrating with the fervor of a society held in the grip of constant fear for more than five years. Albus feels like partying himself, or at least indulging in a rare glass of quality whiskey with Aberforth or Minerva, but he knows that there is far too much to accomplish now. The most important item on that list was to ensure the safety of the young heir to the Potter family.

Albus's heart breaks a little more just to think of the boy. Hardly more than a year old, no truly permanent memories of the love and affection his family had shown him his whole life, and everything he could possibly have loved was dead and gone. Lily and James – dear James, for whom the sheer joy of life was enough, and whose love of Transfiguration had first drawn the headmaster (formerly the teacher in that subject himself) to a friendship with the man – were gone. Lupin was in hiding, of course – his lone-wolf tendencies taken advantage of for once, and thus far beyond the reach of Albus, even if it could be safe for Harry to stay with him in such dangerous times. Little Peter Pettigrew was gone.

And Sirius Black – James Potter's best friend, the Potter's trusted Secret Keeper, the shining example Albus had been longing for for so long that blood proves _nothing_ and it is the decisions one makes that defines him – Sirius Black had taken every expectation laid on him, every hope and plea, and all the faith that seven years of friendship with his closest friends could bestow upon him, and shattered them upon the ground to join Voldemort and destroy the Wizarding world.

It made Dumbledore so, so _angry_. And so very, very tired.

But there were other considerations to add to Dumbledore's calculated risk in placing young Harry under the dubious care of the Dursleys. Death Eaters, leaderless and alone and frantic, were stalking the land less than a full day after the apparent death of their master. Dumbledore knew that they would not hesitate to take vengeance on the one who had destroyed him; some would certainly come for the boy, and in a world where Albus could guarantee no safety for anyone, this little protection for one so precious was the absolute least he could do – and likely more than he should risk, taking into his hands the life of one who would, whether he liked it or not, certainly rise to a position of power and influence. He did not fear Death Eaters in this case; Dumbledore, with the wisdom of long experience, simply knew that he was not to be trusted with great power, for he would inevitably abuse it.

And yet...as Dumbledore unwrapped a sticky candy and ate it, he watched Hagrid hurtle from the sky on an enormous motorbike and land. In his arms was an impossibly small, impossibly innocent bundle of cloth that represented a light in the darkness that their world sorely needed, and Dumbledore found that no matter what, he could no more turn the child away from safety than he could remove one of his own hands. Taking the child, Albus Dumbledore placed the hope of the Wizarding World on a doorstep in Surrey, England, and walked away.

It was the hardest thing he would ever do.


End file.
